The Paper You Need Before We Can Even Start Your Deed

Out here that matters more than in a platted subdivision. A lot in a Nashville neighborhood might read "Lot 14, Whispering Pines, as recorded in Plat Book 3." Clean and short. But wooded acreage near Brown County State Park often carries a long metes-and-bounds description written decades ago, referencing a fence line, a creek bed, or a stake that a surveyor drove in years back. Copy one bearing wrong and the deed you record doesn't match the land you bought. So we start from the source.

What actually counts as the paper

The document we need is the last recorded deed... the instrument the seller signed when they took title. It carries a recording stamp from the Brown County Recorder, a book and page number or an instrument number, and the full legal description. That's the piece we build from.

A few things people hand us that feel like they should work, but don't stand in for it:

• The property tax statement. It's useful for the parcel number and confirms who's paying, but the tax description is a shorthand. It is not the legal description we can convey.
• The purchase agreement. It tells us the deal, not the deed. Great for terms, no legal description we can rely on.
• An old survey. Helpful context, and we'll look at it, but a survey shows lines on the ground, not the recorded language that transfers ownership.
• A title company's closing statement from years ago. Good record, wrong document.

If you have the recorded deed in a drawer or a scanned PDF from your last closing, that's the golden ticket. If you don't, don't lose sleep over it. Most sellers don't keep a crisp copy on hand, and that's completely normal.

What we do when nobody can find it

Here's the part that takes the pressure off. You usually don't have to produce anything. When we run the title search, pulling the recorded chain from the Recorder's office is the whole job. We locate the prior deed, read its legal description, and confirm the seller is conveying exactly what they own.

That search is also where we catch the things that make Brown County property its own animal. An old easement letting a neighbor cross to reach the back forty. A well shared under an agreement written in the 1970s. A description that references the creek as it ran before it shifted. None of these are problems, they're just history, and they live in the recorded documents. We'd rather find them now, on paper, than have them surface after you've signed.

So when we ask early whether you have the prior deed, we're not putting the work on you. We're saving a day. If you happen to have it, we start drafting sooner. If you don't, we pull it ourselves and keep moving. Either way, the deed we prepare gets built on the real recorded description, not a guess.

Get us the parcel number and we're off

The single most helpful thing you can hand us at the start isn't the deed itself. It's the parcel number, sometimes called the state parcel ID or the tax key. It's printed on the property tax statement, and it's the fastest thread for us to pull to find the recorded chain in Brown County's records. Give us that, plus the seller's name as it appears on title, and we can locate the prior deed and start confirming the description right away.

If you're buying from Indianapolis or Cincinnati and this is your first Indiana closing, you can read the state's plain overview of how Indiana records real estate documents through the county recorder to see how the chain gets kept. But you don't need to become an expert. That's what you hired us for.

The deed is the thing that makes your ownership official once we record it back with the Brown County Recorder. Getting it right starts with reading the right piece of paper first. Send us the parcel number when you're ready, and we'll take it from there.